Dan North, Agile troublemaker, developer and originator of BDD will give a talk for the Configuration Management Specialist Group (CMSG) and the Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA (http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/london-office-guide.pdf)) on Thursday 25th November 2010, from 1800 to 2100.

This bookable event is free and open to all with buffet and refreshments but you must register online via the BCS booking system for catering and security reasons:

* Direct link takes you directly to the event registration form (you must login first)
* www.bcs.org/events/registration – requires you to select the event (id 5008) from the list – use this link if you have not registered with BCS

Synopsis

Big organisations like to centralise. They like the control and management of centralised services. Distributed source code management (DSCM) systems such as git and mercurial represent a potentially disruptive shift in version control. Dan has been using DSCMs for his personal projects for a couple of years now, and recently his company – a 500 person trading firm – took the decision to embrace DSCM and begin the migration towards git from its centralised, monolithic Subversion repository.

In this talk, Dan outlines some of the differences between centralised and distributed version control systems, from a technical, social and organisational perspective, and describes some of the challenges of migrating towards and using DSCM successfully in a commercial setting.

Bio

Dan writes software and coaches teams in agile and lean methods. He believes in putting people first and writing simple, pragmatic software. He believes that most problems that teams face are about communication, and all the others are too. This is why he puts so much emphasis on “getting the words right”, and why he is so passionate about behaviour-driven development, communication and how people learn. He has been working in the IT industry since he graduated in 1991, and he occasionally blogs at dannorth.net.